Nicholas Sanino, 104 Tidewater Road . . .
Nearby, I heard footsteps and what sounded, oddly, like my mother’s humming. Lifting my head to look back, I saw that the woman had already left our property and was on her way to the car, close enough that she’d see me if I stepped onto the road. That’s what I should have done, of course: gotten out and confronted her. But panic compelled me to shove everything back in the glove compartment then throw myself over both sets of seats, until I landed with a thud in the very back of the station wagon. I reached around and found a blanket, gritty with sand, which I tugged over my body.
A moment later, I heard her arrive at the car. That song she hummed was too full of false cheer, too easily recognizable, to be anything like my mother’s, I realized. And where my mother’s tune had a way of slowly fading from her lips, the woman’s stopped abruptly. In the silence, I braced myself for the wide back door of the station wagon to swing open, for the blanket to be yanked off and for her to discover me. But there was only the sound of a door closing up front in a quiet click, the sound of a buckling seat belt, the sound of the car shifting into gear, and then the feeling of motion as the woman turned the station wagon around.
When we reached the end of the lane, the tic-tic-tic of my heart felt more frantic, more explosive, than Rose’s rabbit’s ever had beneath its soft fur. The shhhh grew louder too. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket to feel those pictures of my grandparents and my father and my uncle—even if I could not see them, I hoped they might bring some small comfort the way Howie said. But as the station wagon pulled onto the main road and picked up speed, moving faster and faster, I fished around that pocket, then another, before realizing the pictures must have fallen out somewhere. Same as all those people’s possessions in the theater years before, they were lost. But that wasn’t all. My violet diary, the pages filled with so many secrets of my parents’ lives, so many secrets of my life as well, it was gone now too.
Chapter 18
Gone
In those thick old novels my mother used to force upon me, characters were forever having foreboding dreams. Jane Eyre dreamed of infants, sometimes wailing, other times hushed in her arms. Pip suffered through feverish nightmares in which he found himself no longer human, but rather a brick cemented into a wall, unable to move.
The night I dumped Penny down the well, then slipped beneath the sheets of my bed while those horse limbs lay piled on my desk, it only made sense that I should be haunted by turbulent dreams too. My subconscious could have churned up any number of images: Penny climbing out of that watery grave, my mother waking to find her soaked body oozing dank well water on the mattress beside her. Worse, I might have dreamed that it was me trapped down there beneath the earth, crying out for help. Instead, I slept more peacefully than I had in the months since that doll came to our house. Not a single disturbance until the sound of angry voices in real life began weaving their way into my tranquil subconscious.
“I’ve done everything you’ve asked! Everything!”
“I don’t believe you! I’m sorry, but I don’t! You’ve used up all your currency! Spent! Done! Gone!”
“Please. The two of you calm down. Now tell us what you did to her.”
“Her? You mean it! And I told you, nothing!”
“How about telling the truth for a change? Now spit it out!”
“You want the truth? Okay, the fact is this: there is not a single thing wrong with me, but there is something very wrong with the two of you! Who else would put—”
“Don’t start that up again! I warned you! Now stick to the subject!”
“I am sticking to the subject! Because it all comes back to the way we live our lives around here! It’s not normal!”
I opened my eyes. Sun streamed through the window. Quickly, I got out of bed and threw on some clothes, making my way down the hall and the stairs. When I stepped into the living room, my mother was seated in her rocker, wearing her bathrobe and slippers, while my father paced back and forth by the curio hutch.
“There’s Sylvie,” Rose said. “Ask her. Go ahead. She’ll tell you.”
“Tell them what?” I asked.
“Tell them that I didn’t touch their fucking spooky old rag doll!”
“Rose!” my mother said at the same time as my father yelled, “Watch your mouth, young lady! We don’t talk like that in this house!”
“Oh, that’s right, because it’s so holy around here!”